Imagine yourself in this scenario, based on the proverbial true story: You are an in-house counsel for a technology company. As you sip your morning coffee, the VP of your company’s product development group bursts into your office and asks if you can drop everything to review an inbound software license that she calls “critical” to the company’s efforts to update one of its key products.
Her face reddened by stress, she explains that the deal needs to close “yesterday.” When you review the contract, you are relieved to discover that its terms are fairly reasonable, so it will not need major changes. The other party to the contract, you notice, is a U.K. corporation based in London with an innocuous sounding name: Critical Software Ltd.
